


Swirling Shapes and Lives Lost

by bossxtweed



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Child Death, Infant Death, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 17:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17605322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bossxtweed/pseuds/bossxtweed
Summary: A brief snippet from Jack's time during WWII.





	Swirling Shapes and Lives Lost

Travelling via train through France, the regiment of soldiers was a bundle of fraying nerves that grew worse as more seconds passed without word from their commander. Tall and handsome, an American Volunteer. He seemed to always know more than he let on and would always deflect questions by posing ones of his own, such as: _who wants to strip and race down to the river?_

Yet he had of late ceased those antics. His soldiers remarked that he seemed quieter, more subdued, even contemplative, and it struck them as odd that he took to wearing an oversized coat despite the immense heat.

“Sir?” one of the soldiers asked, giving a tentative knock on the lavatory door. Their commander had taken ill at all hours of the day for the past week or so, and they all doubted that food poisoning could last that long.

The soldier waited. And listened. Oh, did he **_have_ **to listen? Again, their commander emptied the contents of his stomach despite having eaten very little the night before.

Another knock, another question.

Silence, followed by the sound of the toilet flushing and someone standing, then running water and a sort of gargling. The soldier waited.

His commander emerged a moment later, his tight shirt showing an bulge around his middle that _surely_ had not been there a week prior. He caught the soldier staring and crossed his arms. “Yes, Campbell?”

“I-- I just--” he withered under the man’s stare. “The-- the others, Sir. Wanted me check on you, seeing as you’ve been so ill lately. Are you all right?”

Captain Jack Harkness smiled, shook his head. “You’re all _so sweet_ to worry, but like I’ve said before, it’s just a bad case of _food poisoning_!” He went to leave but turned back, asking, “If you’re all worried so much, why didn’t you send Johnson?”

Campbell’s eyes widened. Trembling now, he forced himself to swallow and whisper, “That’s another thing, Sir. Johnson’s disappeared. No one has seen him for _two days,_ Sir. We thought maybe you had given him leave--”

“While we’re _still moving?!_ ” Jack snapped, his own words forming swirling, indecipherable shapes in the air before him. He shook his head but they did not leave. _“No,_ I _didn’t!_ We have a company of _fifty_ men and now you’re telling me we’re down to only _one_ medic?”

For his own shake, Campbell looked ashamed enough, and Jack wasn’t mad at _him_ so much as at the fact that Johnson’s disappearance marked the _tenth_ in this company’s two-year tour. All under similar circumstances: the victim, one of the team’s few medics, would start acting strange out of nowhere, retire to his cot, rise early the next day and vanish for a week, until one his fellows stumbled upon his corpse. Bloody, torn open in the middle, his guts spilling onto his uniform. Each one the same, as if professionally done.

As if dissected.

“Sir!” Three more soldiers came running, their faces pale and eyes wide with fear. “Sir, we-- we’ve found Johnson. In with the cargo, splayed out, just--” the soldier swallowed. “Just like the others.”

Their sweat tasted like rotten apples.

They led him to the cargo cabin, which had already been marked off to prohibit entry, and stood back at his signal.

With his gun drawn, Jack took a cautious step into the room and immediately gagged as the scent hit him with visions of dark, ominous swirls. _Get out,_ he thought, and something in his gut twinged. _You can’t afford to see this-- if they find out…_

“Sir?” Campbell queried, taking a cautious step forward to gently shake his commander’s shoulder. Jack stood still, both eyes closed and a hand clapped over his mouth. “Sir, are you--”

Jack shook free of his grip, lowered his hand, and kept walking, blinking away the menacing shapes that swam before him.

“The air,” he said, glancing around as his men filed in behind him.

“What was that, Sir?” one of them asked.

“It tastes like rubber.”

The four soldiers exchanged shrugs and glances, knowing Jack to have said odder things.

They stopped at the opposite end of the cabin, where Johnson sat propped up against the wall, his head drooping into the empty cavity of his chest, his guts spilled onto his trousers and the steel floor below. Immediately Jack recoiled, his gun falling from his one hand and the other flying up to cover his mouth. And again, that twisting ache in his gut. _When will it end?_ he thought. _The death, the_ **_pointless_ ** _deaths and losing those I care about?_

He had already arranged his own leave for a few months’ time. Rest, recuperation, the _chance_ to enjoy a bit of domesticity before throwing himself back into the fray, a new photograph held close to his heart…

“They gutted him, just like they did the others,” he choked out, fighting back a wave of bile. Rightening himself, he asked, “Have there been reports of this happening to others?”

 _Maybe it’s random,_ he thought; _maybe this is all a coincidence…_

In the last war, when the trains weren’t as comfortable and Jack was suffering in the same manner as he was now and his soldiers had not yet accepted his authority, **five** of them had died in this manner. _The worst part,_ Jack had realized upon seeing the first victim, _is that they were still alive when it happened._

He gagged again and pushed past his men, whose words now appeared as brown and green yarn falling from their mouths. “I-- excuse me,” his own words formed a yellow fog that expanded to surround him and left his skin feeling both hot and sticky.

Reaching the water closet, he slammed the door shut and fell to his knees, doubling over the toilet. _Why_ **_now_** _?_ A twinge in his gut, and then--

The train stopped later that day outside of a small, rural village, and Jack’s men set about burying Johnson. Standing nearby, Jack held a cloth over his mouth.

Campbell left the others to join him. “Are you all right, Sir? You look a bit worse than usual, and we’ve been talking…” he glanced over at the others, their backs straining with each shovelful of dirt they poured into Johnson’s grave. “I mean, it’s like you’re letting yourself go. If it’s the drink--”

Jack stopped him with an upraised hand. “I haven’t been drinking, Campbell. It’s the heat and the food, and now Johnson’s gone and we _still_ haven’t reached the front, and _how many more_ of you will I have to lose before this is over?”

Dipping his head, Campbell reached forward and took Jack’s hand. The touch left a sour taste in Jack’s mouth and he drew back, eyes narrowed, an unreadable expression on his face.

 _It’s Campbell,_ he thought, finding himself jerked thirty years back in time. _Josiah R. Campbell, who served under me all those years ago._

Red-haired, bright-eyed, Josiah had been seventeen when the war started and nineteen when he transferred from another regiment to serve under Jack and perhaps recent events had skewed his perceptions, but Josiah Campbell did not look a day older than he had back then.

“Captain!” the other soldiers abandoned their shovels and ran over, hands raised in placation. _“What are you doing?”_

Jack’s head ached and he felt yet another twinge in his gut. His child, all those years ago… the memory burned behind his eyes and strengthened the sour taste on his tongue. Campbell, standing over him with sharp, razor-like claws, cutting him open and pulling out his insides-- and when Jack had healed, his child had not come back.

“Get your hands _off_ me!” he ordered, shrugging free of their grasp. “This-- this **_isn’t_ ** Josiah Campbell; that man _died_ in **_1916,_ ** during the war. This is either a _really_ good imitation, or--” he sniffed the air. “--a puppet.”

The creature hissed, the dead skin of Josiah Campbell beginning to fall away.

“No, you don’t,” Jack spat. One swift bullet between the eyes knocked the creature backwards and it crumpled to the ground, the perception filter fading as it died.

“Bury it,” he ordered, not sparing the monster a second glance as he walked away.


End file.
